[American Thinker] As the title suggests, The Case for Trump, balances a clinical approach to our currently incendiary politics alongside a brief for Donald Trump’s presidency. Of course, the success or failure of this attempt is a subjective matter though it seems to me that any reader of this book of whatever political stripe would concede that, for its length, it is thorough if not encyclopedic in its presentation of facts and its historical depth. All of which is not surprising in that Victor Davis Hanson, occupies a unique position among the commentariat: he is a classical scholar, professor, historian, novelist, political, cultural commentator and farmer in California’s central valley while maintaining a residence in Palo Alto where he is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution on the Stanford campus. He is also a visiting professor at Hillsdale College in Michigan while spending appreciable time overseas.
One can see that his distinctly varied experiences are part of why he remains an engaging thinker and which makes all of the 372 pages of this book fly by. In a word, the book is a deliciously informative and an eminently readable take on the Trump ship of state as it tries to navigate around the depth charges laid by the treacherous deep state armada and a giddy and obtuse paparazzi.
Dr. Hanson’s opening chapter is his longest, wherein he demonstrates that by 2016 the traditional vision of "the two Americas" had ossified into mere "stale sloganeering." As he puts it, "Trump did not create these divides. He merely found existing sectarianism politically useful, and, like President Obama, he far more adroitly leveraged it than had prior Republican nominees. "